Once it became clear that the remastered Quake was Quake I already had in my own home, I reinstalled it straight away and jumped in - long enough to determine that these places are filed mentally as real places I have been.
I didn't think of them that way, the main thing I remembered was that you pushed buttons not with an Action Button but with your face. You walked up to the button and you rubbed your face on it and then it was pushed. But there's a couple specific areas that I just… felt on the back of my neck. I could smell them.
Purely just as a piece of historical trivia, I can remember buying Quake at a fucking 7-Eleven. It wasn't a game box, it was just a CD-ROM, and not even the jewel case kind but the kind that was mostly cardboard. I grabbed two copies, one for myself and one for Monsieur Gribeaux. And then - I looked this up to verify I had not simply become addled by age and malnutrition - you called id Software on the phone to pay for an unlock code, because it was a shareware thing. We used to call them "macrotransactions."
I was startled to learn that it came out in 1996. It's hard to start tugging on this thread, because Quake isn't just a game, although it is that also. It's bound up in so many things: the mods you could build with it, the fact that it was a creature native to the Internet, the dawn of consumer level 3D acceleration… and mouselook wasn't the default. QuakeWorld, a free update to the game but also a reasonable term to describe the world it continues to influence, offered "client-side prediction" and there was a - I swear to God - there was a Netscape plug-in you could use to find servers in the browser. You never, ever know when you are making the future.
I won't be able to stream today, but my suspicion is that Mike Krahulik will take you on some kind of carpet ride at 2pm PDT on Twitch. Pokemon may be involved. Or evolved. Both seem likely, if not absolutely certain.
(CW)TB out.
